What makes a book series?

Wrox Executive Editor Chris Webb and author Keyvan Nayyeri had a recent conversation about what makes a book series. It started in a round-about way with Chris commenting on a discussion about what makes a good book cover.

For me, what makes a book series is a really important issue for the kind of books we publish. Chris cites the best known series "for Dummies" in his response to Keyvan. I still remember when I first really understood the "for Dummies" series (then published by IDG Books, which changed it name to HungryMinds was later acquired by Wiley and is now edited by another team in Wiley). I was working at the other big computer book publisher in Indianapolis, watching customers at a Borders store in the mid-90s, and I saw a customer looking at TCP/IP for Dummies. I listened in on the conversation with the store employee. This person was a network admin. Here was someone capable of installing, running, configuring, maintaining Netware and Windows NT, looking at TCP/IP for Dummies. That's when I suddenly realized that "for Dummies" wasn't for actually dumb people, written by dumb people, or any of the other insults hurled at the series by industry literati. No, it was about that dumb feeling you get when something new and possibly complex is intimidating. In the mid-90s, TCP/IP was as foreign and new to most network admins as foreign language is to me. Having barely passed Latin in college, I was suddenly wishing I'd had Latin for Dummies and having that "oh no" feeling about what books I was publishing. If people as smart as network admins really felt they needed a Dummies book, where did that leave me. (All apologies to the great "for Dummies" team which has a very carefully worded mission which I'm sure I'm butchered here - lets' hope I don't get smacked around too much Monday for being so ignorant on their series.)

Flash forward a dozen years to the Professional series that is the mainstay at Wrox. It's also really easy to break this series down into the key promise:

it's written for experienced, professional programmers and developers.

On each book, we try to assess any prerequisites, implied or explicit, and have the authors and editors get and understanding of: Do they know some previous version of this language or tool? Do we just assume they know some OOP language or similar tool? What does that mean about what we cover in the book? That simple series philosophy really dictates most of what goes into the books.

Everything else is window dressing. The photos on the covers, the size of the paper, the length of lines, whether or not it is OK to use code in sidebars, that isn't what makes the series. That's just what helps people recognize the series.